Call for paper: Trust in Complex Systems – Approaches from the Social Sciences, Philosophy, Engineering and Management

Trust in Complex Systems – Approaches from the Social Sciences, Philosophy, Engineering and Management

The aim of this Special Issue is to review the role of trust in society on the background of current developments in economy, politics, engineering, healthcare, education, etc. and the grand challenges related to them. In line with the focus of the journal, these developments are associated with growing complexity of systems operations, which make trust relevant in new ways and to larger degrees. A particular focus will be set on trust and digital technology, including trust in artificial intelligence (AI), which currently attracts a lot of attention in academia, industry, and policy making.

Transparency, explainability and predictability of systems operations are reduced – an effect that receives particular attention in application of information technology, such as big data and artificial intelligence (Chen et al., 2014; Harper, 2017; Angelov et al., 2021). For trust, these developments raise additional questions and create new challenges in systems design, management, and regulation, regarding generalized trust in society as well as particularized trust in interactions with humans or technology. They are reflected in multifunctional views of organizations across different social systems (Roth et al., 2025; Roth and Sales, 2025), as well as different layers of design, resilience, or identity formation (Maurer and Fritzsche, 20; Davies et al., 2023).

List of topic areas

Our special issue aims to give an overview of this phenomenon from different perspectives. It
invites contributions by social scientists, philosophers, engineers, and management scholars
who study trust in complex systems conceptually or empirically. Potential research topics
include, but are not limited to:

• Trust in digital technology, including artificial technology, robots, and big data
• The role of institutions as mediators of trust
• The effects of social media on basic trust and feelings of trustworthiness
• System trust and leadership in organisations
• Trustworthy education for trust
• Trust and autopoiesis in social systems
• Trust, indeterminacy, and the “unknown” in engineering design and innovation

All contributions are expected to meet the highest standards of rigour and relevance in scientific research. We strongly encourage scholars from dynamic societies that are underrepresented in academia to submit their work to this special issue, adding a fresh new perspective to the ongoing discourse.

To increase the quality of submissions to this special issue, a paper development workshop will be held at IEDC in Bled Slovenia on 11th-12th November 2025. Authors interested in participating in this workshop are expected to send their application to research@iedc.si until 30th September 2025, together with a 500-word extended abstract of their paper. For all further questions, please contact the editors of the special issue directly.

Key dates

Deadline for Expressions of Interest to attend the paper development workshop: 30th September 2025
Paper development workshop in Bled, Slovenia: 11th-12th November 2025
Submission to Kybernetes Journal opens: 1st December 2025
Deadline for paper submission: 31st May 2026
Expected publication date of the special issue: 31st March 2027